Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (review)

Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe. By Richard I. Cohen (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998) 358 pp. $50.00.

In this innovative and thought-provoking book, Cohen illustrates how an awareness of Jewish art can enhance our understanding of Jewish integration and acculturation in Western and Central Europe between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. Refuting the oft-repeated notion that Jews were a people of the book and disdained visual imagery, Cohen has amassed an impressive wealth of visual materials--drawings and paintings, ceremonial objects, and illustrated manuscripts--that have been largely ignored by historians of modern Jewry. By focusing on Jewish art, as well as the ancillary activities associated with it--patronage, art collecting, and the creation of Jewish museums--Cohen makes three contributions to our understanding of Jewish modernization. First, he offers insight into the changing nature of Jewish-Christian relations. Second, he illustrates how art can inform us about the everyday life of Jews, thus diminishing the gap between the elites and the more traditional Jewish masses. Finally, he illustrates how Jewish art reflected the changing self-consciousness of Jews during this era of immense social transformation. As Cohen shows, for those Jews experiencing acculturation and secularization in the mid-nineteenth century, Jewish art, together with the newly emerging discipline of Jewish history, served as one of the few remaining links with a Jewish tradition that was increasingly viewed in ethnic and historical terms rather than through the prism of religious observance.

This book is divided into six chapters, which generally follow a chronological progression. In the first chapter, "The Visual Image of the Jew and Judaism," Cohen traces the way in which both Christian and Jewish art in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries began to reflect a new sense of religious tolerance, despite the ongoing religious tensions of this period. Christian depictions of Jews began to move away from the extremely negative anti-Jewish stereotypes characteristic of medieval Christian art, and increasingly portrayed Jews in a more humane and objective light. This art also began to focus on Jewish customs, not to emphasize their strange and mysterious character, but rather to show that Jews were one ethnic and religious group among many--a view that reflected a new appreciation of cultural and religious pluralism in the aftermath of the Reformation and the age of exploration, especially in countries like Holland. According to Cohen, these Christian artists functioned as the first anthropologists of Jewish life, providing their audiences with generally accurate and unbiased depictions of Jewish customs and ceremonies. By the same token, the Jewish art of this period was also intended to reach out to Christians. The portrait of a bare-headed Leon da Modena, for example, which served as the frontispiece to his famous apologetic work, Historia de Riti Hebraici (Venice, 1638), reinforced Modena's apologetic message that Judaism was ultimately a rational religion, deserving of respect and toleration.

In his second chapter, "Ceremonial Art, Patronage and Taste," Cohen offers a fascinating glimpse into patterns of Jewish patronage, and uses Jewish ceremonial objects to illuminate aspects of everyday life frequently overlooked by historians. Although this Jewish ceremonial art was generally produced by Christian craftsmen, providing yet another avenue for Jewish-Christian interaction, it generally reflected the tastes of its patrons, whether they were wealthy individuals, synagogues, or religious confraternities. Whereas some ceremonial objects, such as Torah ornaments, arks, and Passover Haggadoth, became increasingly ornate in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, reflecting the desire of their patrons publicly to display their wealth, others, such as Ketuboth, or wedding contracts, began to lose their importance as art objects due to the growing influence of the state over matters such as marriage.

In the third chapter, "The Rabbi as Icon," Cohen illustrates how portraits of orthodox rabbis became veritable icons among traditionalist Jews in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although this hagiographical tendency was not as unprecedented...