The Visual Dimension: Aspects of Jewish Art, Published in Memory of Isaiah Shacher (1935-1977) (review)

Book Reviews 181 concept of the mensch in analyzing Jewish manliness. Despite these criticisms, this is a book every reader of this journal would enjoy. Steven A. Riess Department of History Northeastern Illinois University The Visual Dimension: Aspects ofJewish Art, Published in Memory of Isaiah Shacher (1935-1977), edited by Clare Moore. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993. 184 pp. 8 color plates, 136 b/w ills. $29.95. Papers presented at the First International Conference on Jewish Art, held in Oxford in 1977, constitute this miscellaneous collection whose appearance in 1993 has been justified as an act of pietas in honor of Shacher, a distinguished scholar who inspired many to take "Jewish Art" seriously. The papers bear the signs of their origin and are disparate in nature, if suitably dedicated. Joseph Gutmann asks the familiar question, "Is There aJewish Art" (pp. 1-19); he reviews the historiographical aspect of the issue, the difficulty in determining the identity of the subject and its ethnic/functionalist dimensions, their dependence on a "Jewish" use or Jewish maker, the value of present-day distinctions between Jewish and Israeli art, and the tension between the so-called traditional weakness of Jews in the field of the visual arts and the rise of Jewish artists in the modern secular world. There is Iiule or no resolution of these issues in his essay, or in the coda to it offered by Vidosava Nedomacki (pp. 21-23) which opens with the statement, "The term 'Jewish Art' should be placed in the category of those concepts that cannot be determined with clarity ... ," and then goes on to argue, quite sensibly, that the question is not whether there is a Jewish art but whether it is possible to write a history of the art of the Jewish people in all its variety with the ultimate goal of reaching a synthetic view of its development and characteristics. This is a worthy but, probably, unreachable goal, given the extraordinary diversity and duration of the Jewish experience with art and a concept still burdened with nineteenth-century racial and ethnic ideas about the particularized creativity of a "people." No one would seriously challenge the idea that modern Jews in the Diaspora and in Israel participate actively in the world of the visual arts as artists, architects, designers, film-makers, patrons, collectors, scholars, museum curators, and consumers. Whether their activities have a particular "Jewish" coloration has yet to be demonstrated with any degree of consensus, even when dealing with that 182 SHOFAR Fall 1994 Vol. 13, No.1 most devastating Jewish experience of modern times, the Holocaust. Perhaps, in the secular realm in which most of this activity occurs, not even a recognizable Jewish content norJewish authorship seems to possess distinguishing features, critically useful, for example, in qualifying paintings by Mark Rothko. The two succeeding articles by Ursula Schubert on "The Continuation of Ancient Jewish Art in the Middle Ages" (pp. 25-45) and by Therese Metzger on "The Iconography of the Hebrew Psalter from the Thirteenth of the Fifteenth Century" (pp. 47-81) represent very competent, if oldfashioned , treatments of their subjects. The first projects backward in time to hypothetical but unpreserved models, and forward to medieval Biblical illustration elements Schubert defines as "Jewish" in the paintings from the third-century synagogue in Dura Europos. Metzger deals quite sensitively with a body of illustrated Hebrew manuscripts whose close dependence on the verbal text and limited repertoire of images, with the exception of David, differentiate themselves from contemporary Christian Psalters. Metzger's article is complemented by her introduction and catalog of Hebrew manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, exhibited by Oxford in 1977 (pp. 137fl), useful to be sure but somewhat out of place in this volume. Neither Schubert nor Metzger, however, attempts the kind of indepth analysis offered recently by Kalman P. Bland in his "Medieval]ewish Aesthetics: Maimonides, Body, and Scripture in Profiat Duran" (Journal of tbe History of Ideas 54.4 [1993]: 533-599) that goes far beyond description to explore the aniconic nature of the medieval Jewish experience of works of visual art. Helen Rosenau, the architectural historian, with her usual care writes on "The Architecture of the Synagogue in Neoclassicism...