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  • Jews Among Christians: Hebrew Book Illumination from Lake Constance
  • Suzanne Wijsman
Shalev-Eyni, Sarit, Jews Among Christians: Hebrew Book Illumination from Lake Constance (Studies in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art History 41), Turnhout, Brepols/Harvey Miller, 2010; cloth; pp. xii, 227; 109 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €110.00; ISBN 9781905375097.

Sarit Shalev-Eyni’s book adds a fine piece of new scholarship to the growing corpus of work on the medieval Hebrew book. Shalev-Eyni focuses on a group of six related Ashkenazic manuscripts that, she argues, were all illuminated in the same secular urban workshop in the Lake Constance region of Switzerland, most of which were probably copied by the same scribe.

Chapter 1 presents an overview of the six manuscripts that are at the heart of this book. This is particularly informative for the non-specialist reader because of the clear explanations about the ritual function of each manuscript and manuscript production practices in medieval Jewish communities. Chapter 2 gives a brief overview of Hebrew book illumination practices and the relationship of illuminations to textual structure. Shalev-Eyni’s previously published work explores aspects of ‘illustration as interpretation’ (p. 29) and her discussion here gives the reader insight into the process whereby [End Page 233] Christian iconography was adapted to suit a Jewish context in the decorative programmes of medieval Ashkenazic illuminated manuscripts.

Chapter 3, ‘A Jewish-Christian Dialogue’, deepens this line of enquiry to explore how Jewish–Christian interactions are reflected more broadly by the artwork and production of the manuscripts in the Lake Constance Hebrew group. Like others before her, Shalev-Eyni draws on the exegetical literature of the Midrash to explain how motifs from Christian art have been adapted and reinterpreted from a Jewish perspective. However, her approach to this reinterpretation process is not to view it as only polemical. Instead, Shalev-Eyni gives us a wider view of the cultural and historical circumstances that, paradoxically, allowed images in commissioned illuminated books to reflect the religious and cultural tensions that existed between Jews and Christians, yet be produced cooperatively by a Jewish scribe working side-by-side with Christian artists in a secular atelier. Importantly, Shalev-Eyni has identified the process whereby illuminated books produced for Jewish consumption sometimes deliberately reverse notions of ‘model’ and ‘anti-model’ (see Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Reaktion, 1992)), exchanging the central or marginal location of motifs from that where they are normally found in Latin illuminated manuscripts.

Chapter 4 convincingly argues the common production provenance of this Hebrew manuscript group and the Gradual of St Katharinenthal, demonstrating ‘the close affinity between the Hebrew Lake Constance group and the Gradual’ (p. 125), through careful, detailed analysis of shared style and motifs.

Chapter 5 explores the role the scribe, Hayyim, assumed in the production of the six Hebrew manuscripts. Here, Shalev-Eyni shows an impressive synthesis of codicological, palaeographical, and art historical expertise in her careful analysis of discernible aspects of scribal production in these manuscripts and how these overlap that of the artwork production. Her hypothesis, that the Jewish scribe cooperated closely with the illuminators in the secular urban workshop that decorated these six manuscripts, possibly even working alongside them, is compelling. Chapter 6 rounds off this study with a discussion of social, cultural, and historical elements that reflect, and are reflected by, this group of Hebrew manuscripts, including the role of the Jewish community in local politics, interaction between Jews and Christians in economic affairs, and the likely contact between the Jewish patrons commissioning this group of books and Christian society.

This book is well referenced and the Appendix contains a useful catalogue with descriptions of textual contents, colophon, codicology, known history, decoration programme, and bibliography for each of the six manuscripts. [End Page 234] While the text is fully illustrated with 109 reproductions, it is a pity that the publisher did not include at least a few colour illustrations. Colour pictures would be particularly useful in Chapter 4, since the detailed discussion of shared stylistic and production features between the ‘Hebrew Lake group’ and the Gradual of St Katharinenthal includes descriptions of colour schemes that must be...

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