Windows on Jewish Worlds. Essays in Honor of William Gross, Collector of Judaica, on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday ed. by Shalom Sabar, Emile Schrijver and Falk Wieseman (review)

Collectors of objets d’art tend to be idiosyncratic, obsessive, compulsive, secretive but ostentatious, and seldom open to having their collections scrutinized or challenged by scholars, lest something be found that turns out not to be authentic or not as attributed by the collector. William L. Gross may be, as he himself has claimed, obsessive, but he fails to live up to the general nature of seasoned collectors: his collection is open to students, scholars, and the general public, perennially displayed in exhibitions of Judaica in many Jewish museums in Europe, the United States, and Israel. Now we are treated to a volume of essays honoring him on his eightieth birthday in a sumptuously and exquisitely designed volume, produced by WalburgPers in the Netherlands with Magno Volume paper. This beautiful sewn-bound book, which weighs in at 2.2 kg., should not be dismissed as one designed for the coffee table, though it has more than the usual number of attractive illustrations in color and black and white and can certainly fulfill that role admirably. Rather it should be regarded as an important contribution to the study of Jewish art, as its twenty-two essays by a diverse group of authors do justice to the remarkable collection William Gross has assembled, and shed light on an array of social and cultural issues in many areas of Jewish ceremonial art and history. The contributions emerge almost universally from the Gross collection and inquire into aspects of Jewish life over the last six centuries, as the objects discussed relate to ceremonies, customs, beliefs, and Jewish ritual practice in various countries in the west and east, from the Sephardi and Ashkenazi domain.

The title of the book, Windows on Jewish Worlds, aptly encapsulates its content and refers to Gross’s credo that the Judaica objects are an aperture onto the life of Jews in a particular place and period, as he himself enunciated in a 1994 catalogue:

each one of these items displayed is a window through which I can view and learn about the Jews of a particular place and time. I try to understand the contextual significance, for no Judaic object can be separated either from its Jewish roots or from the more general context of the political, social, economic, and artistic environment in which the Jews who ordered, used, and venerated those objects, lived.

(p. 146)¹

It is intriguing to read the essays while keeping this in mind.

Jeffrey Chajes and Eliezer Baumgarten invite readers to see and ponder the kabbalistic visualizations of the divine visage in a group of fascinating ilanot that Gross collected. From the many existing texts on parchment, the authors have chosen to present a remarkable variety of these kabbalistic trees, those depicting diverse forms of the face of God. From the seventeenth century and in European and Islamic countries, individual scribes produced extensive texts that related to the sefirot while depicting in one form or another the image of God. Deciphering the texts on these ilanot is clearly an enormous task, but the illustrations the authors have included in this short essay provide a glimpse of how practical kabbalistic texts could join with a deep desire to unravel or fantasize the image of the hidden God. The fact that this phenomenon was not uncommon from the seventeenth century and could be found in various countries needs to be considered seriously when tracing the historic development of Jewish religious thought in the modern period.

Such uncommon and little-known artifacts that shed light on and open up behavioral patterns among Jews also emerge in Esther Juhasz’s interesting article...