Project MUSE®: Ars Judaica: The Bar-Ilan Journal of Jewish Art - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/723
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Ars Judaica: The Bar-Ilan Journal of Jewish Art.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 12 (2016) through current issueLatest Articles: Ars Judaica: The Bar-Ilan Journal of Jewish ArtTWOProject MUSE®Ars Judaica: The Bar-Ilan Journal of Jewish Art2516-42521565-6721Latest articles in Ars Judaica: The Bar-Ilan Journal of Jewish Art. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editorial
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963408
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The current issue of Ars Judaica marks the twentieth anniversary of the journal. We could never have reached this milestone without the support of our authors and readers, the international community of scholars, students, art collectors, and artists. Tribute must be paid to the journal’s generous founder Dr. Yonat Floersheim and determined founding editor Prof. Bracha Yaniv; our appreciated guest editors; our valued former partners from The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization; and our current publisher, Liverpool University Press.Our incessant interest in expression and reflection through the art and visual culture of Jewish civilization across the ages and continents, and in ongoing dialogue with surrounding
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/723/image/coversmallEditorial2025-06-19text/htmlen-USEditorial2025-06-192025TWOProject MUSE®75612026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-06-19Verus Israel: The Plague of Darkness in the Sarajevo Haggadah
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963409
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From the time of its initial publication,1 the exact date and provenance of the Sarajevo Haggadah have remained a matter of scholarly debate.2 Scholars broadly assign its production to the mid- to late fourteenth century, most likely in Aragon. Proposals range from northwestern Aragon, close to Navarre,3 to the northeastern region of Aragon, with a community that had close ties with Provençal Jewry and its cultural centers,4 to an even more precise suggestion: the city of Girona.5 For our purposes it suffices to note that there were close ties between the Jews of the Crown of Aragon and those of southern France; in essence, medieval Iberia and southern France may be considered a coherent cultural unit.6 As the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/723/image/coversmallVerus Israel: The Plague of Darkness in the Sarajevo Haggadah2025-06-19text/htmlen-USVerus Israel: The Plague of Darkness in the Sarajevo Haggadah2025-06-192025TWOProject MUSE®1249172026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-06-19Kabbalistic Diagrams, Volvelles, and Visions of Other Beings
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963410
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“Medieval kabbalistic diagrams,” Gershom Scholem wrote, “conceal far more than they reveal.”1 At their core, kabbalistic diagrams are artistically paradoxical.2 To reveal the picture, it must be concealed. Cryptic kabbalistic diagrams and volvelles appear in a commentary on Sefer Yeẓirah, the magnum opus of late thirteenth-century wandering kabbalist Rabbi Joseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi.3 These graphic apparatuses, which are both pleasing to the eye and perplexing to the mind, required a certain technique to prepare, which various copyists did not always attain, and were vital tools toward Ashke-nazi’s astro-kabbalistic path to prophetic visions.4 Thus, the first part of this study is interested in what copyists and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/723/image/coversmallKabbalistic Diagrams, Volvelles, and Visions of Other Beings2025-06-19text/htmlen-USKabbalistic Diagrams, Volvelles, and Visions of Other Beings2025-06-192025TWOProject MUSE®1465802026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-06-19A Jewish Pioneer in Lithography: The Career and Art of Rabbi David Rosenberg
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963411
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Lithography represents a significant milestone in the history of printing. Invented at the end of the eighteenth century by Alois Senefelder (1771–1834), this revolutionary technology nearly supplanted wood and metal engraving entirely. By the mid-nineteenth century, lithography had transitioned from a printing craft to a fully fledged printing industry.1Lithography’s appeal lay in the creative freedom if offered: artists could produce images without needing to master the printing process itself, allowing them to create artwork largely independent of technical constraints.2 This innovation opened the printing world to painters and enabled the production of a variety of genres previously unsuited for printing (or
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963419">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/723/image/coversmallA Jewish Pioneer in Lithography: The Career and Art of Rabbi David Rosenberg2025-06-19text/htmlen-USA Jewish Pioneer in Lithography: The Career and Art of Rabbi David Rosenberg2025-06-192025TWOProject MUSE®1434492026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-06-19Vassily Polenov’s Encounters with Jewish Culture: Historicism and Ethnicity in Russian Painting
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963412
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This article explores the artistic perception of Jews, Jewish material culture, history, and archaeology from an external perspective. Vassily Polenov, a major Russian artist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, visited the Holy Land twice, in 1881–1882 and 1899, while he was painting Gospel themes. During those trips he discovered diverse aspects of what he deemed the “genuine Orient,” encompassing Muslim Cairo, Roman Syria, and Ancient Egypt. During those travels the world of Jewish culture was of special interest to Polenov, who, pondering his Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (1888) and his “From the Life of Christ” cycle (1889–1909), was keen on visiting the Orient in search of historical
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/723/image/coversmallVassily Polenov’s Encounters with Jewish Culture: Historicism and Ethnicity in Russian Painting2025-06-19text/htmlen-USVassily Polenov’s Encounters with Jewish Culture: Historicism and Ethnicity in Russian Painting2025-06-192025TWOProject MUSE®1140942026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-06-19Jewish Business, Polish Nationalism, and Art Collecting in Habsburg L’viv: Naftuła and Michał Toepfer
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963413
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On April 27, 1928, Marceli Harasimowicz, the director of the Miejska Galeria Sztuki (The City Art Gallery), received a letter from the city council.1 The council requested that Harasimowicz satisfy the plea of Jadwiga Toepfer, the widow of the former L’viv businessman and art collector Michał Toepfer, and return part of the collection donated in the early 1900s by Jadwiga’s late husband. Following the council’s request, Harasimowicz formed an ad hoc committee to decide which of the donated works had lost their value, so that their return would cause no material loss to the gallery. As a result, seventy-two of some three hundred works of art donated by Michał Toepfer were returned to his widow. Others remained on
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/723/image/coversmallJewish Business, Polish Nationalism, and Art Collecting in Habsburg L’viv: Naftuła and Michał Toepfer2025-06-19text/htmlen-USJewish Business, Polish Nationalism, and Art Collecting in Habsburg L’viv: Naftuła and Michał Toepfer2025-06-192025TWOProject MUSE®893982026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-06-19Weaving Communist Dreams: Jewish Textile Art between Socialist Realism and Neo-Avant-Garde
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963414
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The Holocaust destroyed much of Jewish lives and their heritage in Hungary. Under the Stalinist Rákosi dictatorship (1948–1953), headed by communists of Jewish origin, Holocaust survivors had to adapt to new anti-bourgeois, anti-clerical rule, while privately dealing with the trauma of the Shoah and questions regarding their Jewish identities.1 Dominated by Soviet ideology, the new society did not admit the exceptionalism of Jewish suffering.2 The state directly intervened in art, banned abstraction, and expected artists to create in accordance with the socialist-realist ideals defined by the Zhdanov Doctrine.3 Despite physical and legal emancipation of women within the framework of Soviet “statist feminism,”4
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/723/image/coversmallWeaving Communist Dreams: Jewish Textile Art between Socialist Realism and Neo-Avant-Garde2025-06-19text/htmlen-USWeaving Communist Dreams: Jewish Textile Art between Socialist Realism and Neo-Avant-Garde2025-06-192025TWOProject MUSE®1366412026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-06-19Beyond Bezalel: Expressions of Jewish Identity in the Art of Female Israeli National Religious Graduates
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963415
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Attitudes toward Jewish national and religious content in the Israeli art scene have undergone a fundamental transformation in recent years. The presence of artists from the religious sector has become much more prominent. I associate this shift with evolving approaches to the field of art in the state national religious education system (henceforth NRE), which have been expressed in official form since the 2000s. In this article, I will focus on the work of female artists who were art students during the period of the change process and experienced the shift firsthand. I will consider expressions of Jewish identity in the work of three active female artists who studied art in religious high schools with an art
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/723/image/coversmallBeyond Bezalel: Expressions of Jewish Identity in the Art of Female Israeli National Religious Graduates2025-06-19text/htmlen-USBeyond Bezalel: Expressions of Jewish Identity in the Art of Female Israeli National Religious Graduates2025-06-192025TWOProject MUSE®693232026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-06-19Image Desecration, From Tales to Trials
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963416
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This is the first book-length study of Jewish desecrators of Christian images. Although blood libel and host desecration have received more attention (see The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Madison, WI, 1991), and Miri Rubin, “Desecration of the Host: The Birth of an Accusation,” in Christianity and Judaism, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford, 1992)), this is the first time that the antagonistic relationship of Jews with Christian images forms the spotlight. This is an ambitious, longue durée study, covering 1,300 years of history, from the early Middle Ages to the end of the early modern period. The geographical focus is also wide-ranging, from Byzantium to France and England
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/723/image/coversmallImage Desecration, From Tales to Trials2025-06-19text/htmlen-USImage Desecration, From Tales to Trials2025-06-192025TWOProject MUSE®116552026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-06-19Fashion City Explores Jews in the Shmatte trade in England
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963417
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The involvement of Jews in Shmattes or the “rag trade” in London’s East End, as on New York’s Lower East Side, is well known. Familiar territory indeed to this reviewer, whose ancestors came from the East End and, before then, fun d’r’eim (fun der heim) – from the “Old Country” in eastern Europe. Great Uncle Feivish (Philip) was the first off the boat of the British branch of my mother’s family, the Skolnicks, in 1905. He set up a tailoring workshop at the back of his rented house at 15 Pelham Street, London, E1. He roped in his younger brother, Moshe/Morris, who married the company’s secretary, London-born Yehudis/Julie. Then he was finally in a position to bring over his parents and two unmarried younger
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/723/image/coversmallFashion City Explores Jews in the Shmatte trade in England2025-06-19text/htmlen-USFashion City Explores Jews in the Shmatte trade in England2025-06-192025TWOProject MUSE®161122026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-06-19The Jewish(?) Museum
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963418
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The Jewish Museum, located on New York City’s famed Museum Mile, holds a preeminent position in the worlds of Jewish art and culture. As perhaps the best-known public-facing institution in the international constellation of Jewish museums and cultural institutions, its evolving mission and programmatic definitions as expressed through its exhibitions, collections, publications, and programs provide a powerful indicator of the calibrations, debates, and vicissitudes surrounding Jewish identities and priorities.Abt’s Prologue sets the scene for his overall approach. His analysis is enriched through interdisciplinary considerations and by nuanced conceptual considerations. Abt ably draws from the broader approaches
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/723/image/coversmallThe Jewish(?) Museum2025-06-19text/htmlen-USThe Jewish(?) Museum2025-06-192025TWOProject MUSE®146912026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-06-19Contributors to This Issue
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963419
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Tal Goitein Independent researcher, IsraelGabriel M. Goldstein Yeshiva University Museum and the North Carolina Museum of ArtLeor Jacobi Bar-Ilan UniversitySharman Kadish Independent researcher, the United Kingdom and IsraelPeter Lanchidi Institute of Art History, Eötvös Loránd University, BudapestAnastasia Loseva Bar-Ilan University (post-doctoral fellow) and the State Institute for Art Studies, MoscowMariann Farkas Bar-Ilan UniversityMirjam Rajner Bar-Ilan UniversityIlia Rodov Bar-Ilan UniversityAnna Russakoff American University of ParisJonnie Schnytzer Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva (post-doctoral fellow) and Bar-Ilan UniversityOrna Segal Talpiot College of Education, HolonAnastasiia Simferovska Northwestern
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/723/image/coversmallContributors to This Issue2025-06-19text/htmlen-USContributors to This Issue2025-06-192025TWOProject MUSE®22112026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-06-19