Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other: Visual Representation and Jewish-Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period (review)

This composite volume is the fruit of a session on the representation of Jews in the Middle Ages presented at the 1999 Medieval Conference at Leeds University. It is noteworthy that although the conference traditionally draws a majority of its participants from Europe, the authors of these essays are all Americans with the exception of the editor. This fact may not be a coincidence but a reflection of the burgeoning interest in Jewish art history among American academics.

Eva Frojmovic's introductory essay, "Buber in Basle, Schlosser in Sarajevo, Wischnitzer in Weimar: The Politics of Writing about Medieval Jewish Art," focuses on the historiographical treatment of medieval works in the context of recent discussions on the role of political discourse in the characterization of Jewish art.¹ A brief review of Martin Buber's ambivalent attitude toward Jewish art opens the chapter: that which had been created in previous centuries demonstrated a lack of Jewish artistic skill; but what would be created in the future Jewish state would be equal to European models. Buber could speak from authority; he had completed his doctorate in art history and philosophy under the distinguished scholars Alois Riegl and Franz Wickhoff. Frojmovic proceeds to an interesting analysis of the Sarajevo Haggadah monograph, published in 1898 with essays by the Christian art historian Julius von Schlosser and the Jewish scholar David Kaufmann of Vienna. To Schlosser, Jewish art emerged from that of the church; he explained the style of the Haggadah as based on the late fourteenth-century art of northern Spain. Kaufmann saw Jewish art as emerging from synagogue decoration but still a part of Western artistic traditions. Frojmovic ends her essay by considering the definitions of Jewish art offered in the 1920s and 1930s by Kurt Frey, Ernst Cohn-Weiner, and Rachel Wischnitzer, with an emphasis on their discussion of medieval works. She concludes that their essays on Jewish art are based on the same nationalist model that had been used by others to exclude Jewish art from the canon of art history.

Most of the remaining chapters in Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other discuss a single manuscript or page of illumination prefaced by a theoretical discussion that appears to have been appended to the original talk given at the Leeds conference. Some dovetail nicely, for example, Marc Epstein's consideration of the Christian reformulation of the Hebrew Bible, which was transformed into an "Old Testament" whose narratives and prophecies "can only be fulfilled in the Christian community and in the life of the Christian savior" (p. 35). This preface precedes a discussion of an illumination in the Golden Haggadah (British Library, Add. MS 27210) of Moses and his family traveling to Egypt that is a reworking of the canonical Christian scene, "The Flight into Egypt." Epstein relies heavily for his interpretation on textual sources, principally midrashim, which presumes that which is not proved—namely, that the relevant literary sources were well known to miniaturists and their patrons in Catalonia where the Golden Haggadah was written and illuminated ca. 1320.² Much more effective are the comparisons to similar iconography in other manuscripts of the period.

Michael Batterman's essay "Bread of Affliction, Emblem of Power: The Passover Matzah in Haggadah Manuscripts from Christian Spain" is flawed in both its premises and its structure. Introductory material is repeated later and some of the text appears in other essays; more stringent editing of the volume would have helped. On the first page, Batterman asserts that Spanish Haggadot are the result of Jewish acculturation with Christians, an assumption that leads him to strained equations of the representation of the matsah and the host, and the attribution of Christian concepts to the Jewish symbol. As Batterman has demonstrated elsewhere, the narrative miniatures preceding the text of the Haggadah appeared after the development of...