Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts

By Marc Michael Epstein, Eva Frojmovic, Jenna Siman Jacobs and 7 more

A superbly illustrated history of five centuries of Jewish manuscripts

The love of books in the Jewish tradition extends back over many centuries, and the ways of interpreting those books are as myriad as the traditions themselves. Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink offers the first full survey of Jewish illuminated manuscripts, ranging from their origins in the Middle Ages to the present day. Featuring some of the most beautiful examples of Jewish art of all time—including hand-illustrated versions of the Bible, the Haggadah, the prayer book, marriage documents, and other beloved Jewish texts—the book introduces readers to the history of these manuscripts and their interpretation.

Edited by Marc Michael Epstein with contributions from leading experts, this sumptuous volume features a lively and informative text, showing how Jewish aesthetic tastes and iconography overlapped with and diverged from those of Christianity, Islam, and other traditions. Featured manuscripts were commissioned by Jews and produced by Jews and non-Jews over many centuries, and represent Eastern and Western perspectives and the views of both pietistic and liberal communities across the Diaspora, including Europe, Israel, the Middle East, and Africa.

Magnificently illustrated with pages from hundreds of manuscripts, many previously unpublished or rarely seen, Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink offers surprising new perspectives on Jewish life, presenting the books of the People of the Book as never before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Oct 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781400865628

Book preview

Cover: Skies of Parchment | Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts edited by Marc Michael Epstein

Barbara Wolff. You Renew the Face of the Earth, illustration from Psalm 104, 2010. New York, Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.1190, fol. 7; Gift of Joanna S. Rose, 2014; photography by Rudi Wolff.

Skies of Parchment | Seas of Ink

Ilene Winn- Lederer. “Even if all the heavens were parchment . . . if all the waters of the sea were ink . . . .” Akdamut from Between Heaven & Earth: An Illuminated Torah Commentary (Pomegranate, 2009).Detail of fig. 2. A community of scholars: the Five Rabbis at B’nai Brak. Haggadah, German rite with the commentary of Eleazar of Worms and illustrations by Joel ben Simeon Feibush (The Ashkenazi Haggadah). South Germany, prehaps Ulm, ca. 1460. London, British Library, MS Add. 14762, fol. 7v.

Skies Of Parchment | Seas Of Ink

Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts

edited by marc michael epstein

With contributions by

Eva Frojmovic, Jenna Siman Jacobs, Hartley Lachter, Shalom Sabar, Raymond P. Scheindlin,

Ágnes Vető, Susan Vick, Barbara Wolff, and Diane Wolfthal

princeton university pressprinceton and oxford

jacket art: (front) Barbara Wolff. You Renew the Face of the Earth, illustration from Psalm 104, 2010. New York, Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.1190, fol. 7; Gift of Joanna S. Rose, 2014; photography by Rudi Wolff. (back) The angel Gabriel appears to Joseph to grant him permission to marry Zulaykha; Joseph and Zulaykha marry. Yusuf and Zulaykha. Persia, Mashad, 1853. MS 1534, fols. 105−6. Image courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York.

half-title: Ilene Winn- Lederer. Even if all the heavens were parchment . . . if all the waters of the sea were ink . . . . Akdamut from Between Heaven & Earth: An Illuminated Torah Commentary (Pomegranate, 2009).

frontispiece: Detail of fig. 2. A community of scholars: the Five Rabbis at B’nai Brak. Haggadah, German rite with the commentary of Eleazar of Worms and illustrations by Joel ben Simeon Feibush (The Ashkenazi Haggadah). South Germany, prehaps Ulm, ca. 1460. London, British Library, MS Add. 14762, fol. 7v.

Copyright © 2015 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Skies of parchment, seas of ink : Jewish illuminated manuscripts / edited by Marc Michael Epstein ; with contributions by Eva Frojmovic, Jenna Siman Jacobs, Hartley Lachter, Shalom Sabar, Raymond P. Scheindlin, Ágnes Vető, Susan Vick, Barbara Wolff, and Diane Wolfthal.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-16524-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Jewish illumination of books and manuscripts. I. Epstein, Marc Michael, 1964- editor. II. Lachter, Hartley, 1974- People of the Book/Book of the people.

ND2935.S59 2015

745.6′7089924—dc23

2014028843

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Published with assistance from the David Berg Foundation, Vassar College, and the Center for Jewish-Christian Learning, Boston College

This book has been composed in Crimson and Source Sans Pro

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in China

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

contents

acknowledgments

1introduction: for the love of books

Marc Michael Epstein

2people of the book/books of the people: illuminating the canon

Hartley Lachter with Marc Michael Epstein

3parchments and palimpsests: scribe, illuminator, patron, audience

Marc Michael Epstein

focus: the illuminated page: materials, methods, and techniques

Barbara Wolff

4mapping the territory: ʾarbʿah kanfot haʾareẓ—the four corners of the medieval jewish world

ereẓ yisrael/the land of israel: homeland and center

Marc Michael Epstein

italia/italy: the first western diaspora

Marc Michael Epstein

ashkenaz: franco-germany, england, central and east europe

Eva Frojmovic with Marc Michael Epstein

sepharad and ʿarav: spain and the middle east

Raymond P. Scheindlin with Marc Michael Epstein

the problem of national style

Eva Frojmovic with Marc Michael Epstein

5no graven image: permitted depictions, forbidden depictions, and creative solutions

Eva Frojmovic and Marc Michael Epstein

focus: exploring the mystery of the birds’ head haggadah

Marc Michael Epstein

6iconography: telling the story

Marc Michael Epstein

geographical distinctions

approaches to the biblical narrative

7dialogue and disputation: cultural negotiation

Marc Michael Epstein

under edom

under ishmael

8this world: centered on the home—women, marriage, and the family

Shalom Sabar

focus: glimpses of jewish life: reality or illusion?

Marc Michael Epstein

focus: incidental details: margins and meaning

Marc Michael Epstein

focus: sacred and profane: naked ladies in the haggadah?

Ágnes Vető

9other worlds: fantastic horizons and unseen universes

Hartley Lachter with Marc Michael Epstein

10zion and jerusalem: the sum of all beauty, the joy of all the earth

Shalom Sabar

11in the royal court: jewish illumination in an age of printing

Marc Michael Epstein

focus: a yiddish minhagim manuscript

Diane Wolfthal

12illuminating the present: contemporary jewish illumination

Susan Vick with Marc Michael Epstein

13continuing the journey: annotated bibliography and manuscript descriptions

Jenna Siman Jacobs with Marc Michael Epstein

manuscripts and facsimiles

surveys

collection surveys and exhibition catalogues

studies

contributor biographies

index

photo credits

acknowledgments

The book you hold in your hands has been long in coming into this world. It manages to exceed even the gestation period of the elephant of the medieval books of beasts, an ordeal rumored to have lasted two years. This volume has been brewing for over two decades, in the course of which time it has gone through the hands of many editors, each hoping to produce a definitive work on Jewish illuminated manuscripts. When the project came to me, I realized that the knowledge and energy of a single author could never sustain it. I therefore gathered together a group of thorough, thoughtful, and innovative scholars to tell the story of Jewish illuminated manuscripts in the most engaging and colorful manner possible. The result, I hope, is nothing like an elephant’s child. This book is anything but gray and ponderous—it is full of all manner of color—a delight for both the eye and the mind. It is to my colleagues in this enterprise that this book owes its soul and its verve. It’s not easy to translate one’s academic passion into a vision that can be shared with the widest possible audience, and I salute them for rising to the challenge.

Since it required the acquisition of hundreds of illustrations and their attendant permissions, conscientious editing to ensure that its tone remained scholarly without being daunting to the reader, and relatively stylistically even over the diverse range of authors while allowing each author to retain her or his distinctive voice, this book would never have seen the light without the exceptional administrative and editorial skills of my research assistants over the many years of its germination—in chronological order, my debt of gratitude extends to Leah Varsano and Samuel Rausnitz, to Gilad Thaler, to Katherine Durr, and finally to the indefatigable and highly pragmatic Angela Brown, who saw the book through the elephantine labor with more finesse than the best veterinary Lamaze coach. My thanks as always to Wendy Post, Amanda Thornton, Betty-Lou Cifone, Greg Deichler, and Brian Chickery, and at Boston College, Wendy Morita, Nate Butze, Michael Swanson, Kerry Burke, and MTS Photography, who were able and cheerful in providing administrative and technical assistance.

I am most grateful to my departmental colleagues in the Religion Department at Vassar for their support: Rick Jarow, Jonathon Kahn, Max Leeming, Lynn LiDonnici, Larry Mamiya, Michael Walsh, Tova Weitzman, Chris White, and Ági Vető. Jim Bernauer, Ruth Langer, and Camille Markey, my colleagues at the Center for Jewish-Christian Learning at Boston College, where I spent 2013–14 as a visiting Corcoran Chair, were extremely encouraging as well.

The friendship and intellectual support, the hospitality and warmth of so many at Vassar and beyond sustained me and brightened my days as I engaged with this project. I am indebted to Eli and Muriel Abt, John Ahern, Liz and Drew Alexander, Mark Bernstein and Sarah Vigneri, Jessie Bonn and Yuval Yavneh, Daniel Boyarin, Stewart J. Brooks and Eve Grubin, Zsofia Buda, Aleksandra Buncic, J. H. (Yossi) Chajes and Julie Chajes, Adam Cohen and Linda Safran, Allegra and Yisrael Meir Cohen, Evelyn Cohen, Eiran Davies and Yael Fried, Joe Dweck, Sapphira and Seth Edgarde, Yaffa Epstein, Larry and Sue Fishman, Lucy Freeman Sandler, Hanna and Philip Geller Goldsmith, Tony Grafton, Joel Hecker and Frani Pollack, Tuva Hildebrand-Petersson, Leor and Dana Jacobi, Gabriel Josipovci, Batya and Menahem Kallus, Bruce Kaplan, Josh Kaplan, David and Rachel Kaplan, Joe Karten and Becca Rosen, Arie Katz and Amy Robinson, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Katrin Kogman-Appel, Abby Kornfeld, Hartley Lachter and Jessica Cooperman, Stacy Leeman and Gary Liebesman, Michael Levin, Abraham and Estelle Levy, Isaac and Cindy Levy, Terry and Toni McDonald, Mary Ann and Mel Makloff, Richard McBee, Mary McGee, Judy Meltzer, Molly Nesbit, Jacqueline Nicholls, Emma O’Donnell and Valery Polyakov, Sara Offenberg, Naomi and Yankel Sarig, Eli Schneider and Ilana Aisen, Jeremy Schoenfeld, Joshua and Lise Schreier, Sarit Shalev-Eyni, Misha and Howard Sidenberg, Annie and Elon Spar, Elie and Linda Spitz, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, David Stern, Michal Sternthal, Gideon Sylvester, Lindsey and Norman Taylor-Guthartz, Yael Unterman, Elisabeth Watson, Menachem Wecker, Matisse Weinberg, Lee and Laura Weissman, Ilene Winn-Lederer, Gil and Ayal Willner, Barbara, Rudi and Ben Wolff, and Elaine Kahn Zager and Jack Zager.

This magnificent book has been produced with the aid of funding from the David Berg Foundation, the Center for Jewish-Christian Learning at Boston College, and the Vassar College Research Committee, and the Office of the Dean of the Faculty—Dean Jonathan Chenette having been particularly supportive. Their generosity is a testimony to their faith in the importance of this project, and I am buoyed by their confidence and support. To Amanda Thornton and Lori Mcelduff, of the Office of Grants Administration, and to Karen Gallagher, at the Purchasing Office, Vassar College, my sincere thanks for making the permissions paperwork go so smoothly.

The librarians who facilitated access to the images used in this book deserve the highest of praise and appreciation. I list them here in alphabetical order by location of their libraries and institutions: Emile Schrijver and Rachel Boertjens, of the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, Universiteit van Amsterdam; Anton Kraus, of the Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam; Christoph Rauch, Petra Figeac, and Sophia Charlotte Fock, of the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Orientabteilung, Berlin (as well as Liz Kurtulik Mercuri, of Art Resource, for administering the image requests); Bart De Sitter, of Lukasweb, representing the Groenige Museum, Bruges; Balazs Tamasi, of the Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, Budapest, for use of images from the Kaufmann Collection; Ruth Long, of the University Library, Cambridge; Laurel Wolfson, of Hebrew Union College Library, Cincinnati; Eva-Maria Jansson, of the Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, with the cooperation of Brent Lexner, of the Jødiske Samfund i Danmark, Copenhagen; Janine Klemm, of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek-Staats-und-Universitätsbibliothek, Dresden; Evelyn Börner, of the Universitätsbibliothek, Erlangen; Ida Giovanna Rao, assisted by Dina Giuliani, of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence; Hans-Walter Stork, of the Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek Carl von Ossietzky, Hamburg; Anna Nizza, assisted by Rachel Laufer, of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Idan Pérez, assisted by Jamie Nathan and Zmira Reuveni, of National Library of Israel, Jerusalem; the staff of the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles; Christoph Mackert, assisted by Susanne Dietel, of the Universitätsbibliothek, Leipzig; Maria Inês Cordeiro, assisted by Ana Sabido and Luísa Vaz, of the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon; Ilana Tahan, assisted by Jackie Brown, of the British Library, London; Elizabeth Gow, assisted by Anne Anderton, of the John Rylands University Library, Manchester; Paolo Cavagna, of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan; Sophie Schrader, of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich; the staff of the Hispanic Society of America, New York; the staff of the Jewish Museum, New York (as well as Veronique Colaprete, of Art Resource, for administering the image requests); Sharon Liberman-Mintz and Jerry Schwarzbard, assisted by Warren Klein, Sarah Diamant, and Yevgenia Dizenko, of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York; Barbara Boehm and Melanie Holcomb of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters, New York; and Roger S. Wieck and the staff of The Morgan Library, New York; César Merchán-Hamann, Zsofia Buda (with special thanks for helping me set all the shelf-numbers in order), and Rahel Fronda, assisted by James Allan and Matthew McGrattan, of the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Jean-Claude Kuperminc, of the Bibliothèque d’Alliance israélite universelle, Paris; Laurent Héricher and Héléna Guy l’homme, assisted by Maria Cristina Pirvu, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; Nicolas Feuillie, of the Musée national du Moyen Âge (Musee d’Art et Histoire du Judaisme), Paris; Sabina Magrini, of the Biblioteca Palatina, Parma; William Gross, of the Gross Family Collection, Ramat Aviv; the staff of the Zemaljski Muzej Bosne I Hercegovine, Sarajevo, with the cooperation of Jakob Finci and the Jewish Community of Bosnia and Hercegovina; Riccardo Luongo, of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City; Shalimar Abigail Fojas White, of Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC; Mark Dimunation, Eric Frazier, and Sharon Horowitz, assisted by Margaret Kiechefer, of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; and Betsy Kohut, of the Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC.

They were all—to a person—tremendously helpful and prompt, and most touchingly, often delighted that their material would be featured in a book that was intended to go out into the world and take pride of place on the shelves of people who were not the usual suspects—scholars and researchers.

I do not think, however, that I could possibly have gotten the materials together so speedily and so smoothly without a virtual army of friends on the ground, fellow scholars with connections, who prompted and pestered and found shortcuts to acquiring the images. They went far above and beyond the call of duty and I salute them with gratitude and with love: Zsofia Buda, Sonia Fellous, Karoline Henriques, Colum Hourihane, Leor Jacobi, Ilona Steinman, Susanne Terwey, and Edward Van Voolen.

An extra-special acknowledgment and appreciation must go to Bill Gross, who provided—in addition to images already secured from his collection (high-quality scans, as always, and, as always, at no charge)—almost instantaneous substitutions when images were unavailable elsewhere. His consummate good cheer and delight in doing so is a testimony to the greatness both of his collection and of his character.

My eternal gratitude to Michelle Komie, my beloved Real Editor in the Old-Fashioned Sense (if one might grace her with a title befitting her), for seeing this book to press and ensuring that it got the attention it deserved, and to her assistant, Claudia Acevedo. I am grateful to Jennifer Harris for her close and insightful reading of the manuscript, to Sara Lerner for molding it to the exemplary standards of Princeton University Press, to Leslie Fitch for ensuring that it became a sparkling peacock rather than a gray elephant of a book, and to Julia Haav for connecting it with the broad audience it is intended to reach.

To my wonderful collaborators and co-conspirators on this project, my deep and sincere appreciation for your fabulous contributions. I hope that they have taken a form worthy of your dreams for them. Still, for my own part, as general editor, I take responsibility for any errors, inaccuracies, or omissions that remain.

Finally: If the skies were made of parchment, and the seas were filled with ink, I could not sufficiently express my love and appreciation for my parents, who taught me to see and to read; to my children, who illuminate my every page; and to Ági, who is sky and sea and mountain and valley and every near thing and every distant horizon to me.

Skies of Parchment | Seas of Ink

1 introduction: for the love of books

Marc Michael Epstein

figure 1

How I love Your Torah, it is my discourse all the day. A man, covered in a prayer shawl, holds a Torah scroll in its embroidered cover in his arms. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah. Italy, perhaps Perugia, ca. 1400. Jerusalem, National Library of Israel, MS Heb. 4° 1193, fol. 32r.

Habent sua fata libelli. Books, remarks the third-century Latin poet Maurus in one of his epigrams, have their own destinies. Once upon a time in the 1980s, when I was a twenty-year-old graduate student full of arrogance and attitude, I worked in the Hebrew books and manuscripts division of the Judaica Department at Sotheby’s New York. My boss was the Judaica expert, the late, great Jay Weinstein, a man truly deserving of his title, which he bore with immense modesty and humor. My own title was also expert, but, by way of contrast, it only exacerbated my supercilious arrogance when I found myself called to the front desk to meet a client. At those moments, I always had a vision in my head of a potential New Yorker cartoon—a white-bearded man in a robe carrying two large tablets inscribed in archaic Hebrew waits patiently while the receptionist pages me: Mr. Epstein, someone with a very old Hebrew book is here to see you.

Indeed, just as in that imaginary cartoon, the client I was about to meet on the day I am describing had called a week before to tell me that he was in possession of a very old Hebrew book. I was not looking forward to the encounter, since auction experts know very well that the hoi polloi consider anything more than ten years old to be ancient and hence of untold value. Disabusing clients of this notion as it applies to their particular treasure is an often painful but necessary task. I steeled myself for what would be necessary to accomplish this: the sustained and enervating projection of a personal impressiveness composed of equal measures of authority and disdain. This was to be no mean feat, considering it was a Monday afternoon and the hour was late.

Mr. X, I was dismayed to find, embodied all my worst fears. Stooped, elderly, still in his coat, and eager—very eager. Authoritative and disdainful though I made myself, he was simply unimpressed by my impressiveness. With total focus and trembling hands, he reached into a plastic shopping bag and produced, wrapped in newspaper older than I was, his treasure—a book of Psalms, printed in Warsaw in 1920. I couldn’t believe this monumental waste of my precious time—a brand new book of Psalms would be worth more than this one! I was exasperated by this schlepper, and I wanted to tell him so. I wanted to show him the real treasures—gold, silver, ancient, and precious illuminated manuscripts—that had been entrusted into my expert care. I wanted to show him the door as I told him with authoritative disdain, That book is worth whatever you paid for it!

But at that moment, like the angel in the legend who moves Moses’s hand toward the glowing coal rather than the glittering crown, thus saving his life, some kindly spirit moved my tongue. And instead of that anticipated send-off, I faltered, Um, what did you pay for this? The old man drew himself up to his full 5 feet, 2 inches. For this, I paid seven days’ Auschwitz bread, he replied with a dignity that totally deflated my pose. It seems that the Nazis had caught him with the little Psalm book, and, as a penalty for possessing it, imprisoned him without food—only water to drink—for an entire week. Like Moses touching the coal to his lips, I was struck dumb. This, I stammered, is too valuable for us to sell. And I stumbled out of the room, a changed young man, with a new appreciation of what is meant by the words precious, valuable, and treasured.

Moses, perhaps due to the childhood encounter with the coal that the story tells us literally scarred him, grew up to be the meekest man on earth. And I, while far from meek, bear to this day the scars where my callousness was abraded by this man’s sincerity, my callowness by his experience, and my cynicism by his faith. I learned then and there, in the most visceral way, that books indeed have their destinies, and each has a story to tell—sanguine or sanguinary. And their stories do not merely tell of themselves; they can, and do, transform readers, collectors, and historians. For involvement with books can be nothing short of a love affair.

The love of books in the Jewish tradition is nowhere better shown forth than in this poetic illustration from a fourteenth-century manuscript of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah. Here, under the rubric How I love Your Torah—she is my meditation all the day! (Psalms 119:97), a man holds a Torah scroll with tender affection—a fitting opening illumination for a folio that enumerates the laws of the reading of the Shm’a, the scriptural verses emphasizing both the Unity of God and the centrality of Torah (figure 1).

The various fates of the books of the People of the Book are particularly rich and variegated, and upon them hang many tales. This book is a labor of love, a compendium of words and images by some of the best and brightest scholars in the field of Jewish manuscript illumination and beyond. It is the first attempt at a comprehensive survey of this field in more than thirty years, and I hope you will find it particularly distinguished by its mission, its composition, and its quality.

When I was approached to take on this project, it occurred to me that it would be both somewhat presumptuous and rather boring to attempt to write the book by myself. The field of Jewish manuscript studies has grown exponentially in the past thirty years, and there are excellent scholars, many of them young, whose contributions bring unprecedented quality, scope, and depth to this work. Moreover, the idea that art is a legitimate form of historical documentation—not just of events but of the attitudes, mentalities, and aesthetics of those who commissioned, and in some cases, created it—has taken off in a dramatic way in that period of years. Just as art is increasingly being applied as a tool for the study of history and culture, I felt that the voices of scholars of history and culture should be included in such a way as to illuminate (if I may be forgiven the use of the word) the places and times in which the works of art we examine herein were created. So this is a work of dialectic, of a community of scholars (figure 2). Our opinions belong to each of us, but as general editor, I accept the burden of any inaccuracies or errors.

figure 2

A community of scholars: the Five Rabbis at B’nai Brak. Haggadah, German rite with the commentary of Eleazar of Worms and illustrations by Joel ben Simeon Feibush (The Ashkenazi Haggadah). South Germany, perhaps Ulm, ca. 1460. London, British Library, MS Add. 14762, fol. 7v.

A word about the title (and contents) of this work: This book will explore what I have styled Jewish illuminated manuscripts, in place of what has tended in the past to be called Hebrew illuminated manuscripts. There are compelling reasons for this. The term Hebrew illuminated manuscripts has the advantage of sounding precise and scientific, a simple categorization on the basis of linguistic content. But of course, it is much more ambiguous than it seems: Does it refer to the illumination of manuscripts whose language is Hebrew? Or does it signify the process of the illumination of manuscripts as undertaken by Hebrews, whoever they might be? And what, in the end, do we gain by avoiding the use of the term Jewish?

Unlike Arabic manuscripts, many of which are written in the Arabic language without necessarily being Muslim in content, the vast majority of illuminated manuscripts written in Hebrew are Jewish in content. And unlike Greek manuscripts, which were commissioned both by Christians and by Greek-reading non-Christians, Hebrew manuscripts were overwhelmingly commissioned by Jewish patrons for Jewish audiences. With the exception of the occasional inclusion of translations of medical or philosophical works, most surveys of Hebrew illuminated manuscripts include manuscripts with identifiably Jewish content: scripture, liturgy, law, poetry, and philosophy. They also routinely include Jewish manuscripts whose language is not Hebrew at all, but Judeo-Arabic, Yiddish, or Ladino. So when scholars speak of Hebrew illuminated manuscripts, they are invariably referring to Jewish illuminated manuscripts.

If that’s the case, why not say so? The act of christening what are essentially Jewish works of art as Hebrew is the result of something beyond a simple desire for scholarly clarity. It represents an attempt to erase the inherent Jewishness of these monuments. As a euphemism for Jewish illuminated manuscripts, the expression Hebrew illuminated manuscripts rings hollow and archaic in an era in which only a benighted few are still afraid to use the J word in polite company. And so, we dare say it: the manuscripts displayed and discussed on the following pages are Jewish—made for, and in many cases, by Jews, in Jewish communities, in the context of the Jewish year, and as part of the tradition of Jewish learning.

figure 3

This bread of affliction. Maẓah as mirror of faces. Haggadah, Italian rite with illustrations by Joel ben Simeon Feibush. Italy, 1454. New York, Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, MS 8279, fols. 49v–50r.

That having been said, they are extraordinarily diverse. As we shall see, they comprise illustrated texts of the Bible, the prayer book, the home liturgy, historical works, books of customs, marriage documents, and household decorations. They are the production of many people—Jews and non-Jews commissioned by Jews—over many centuries, and they represent polities and perspectives east and west, male and female. They represent Jewries from all the world over—communities that were pietistic and communities that were liberal.

It is important, I feel, to note that what they do not represent for the most part is a variety of socioeconomic strata. This book is a mirror of sorts: it displays for you—a by-and-large urbane, educated, and well-to-do audience—the productions of medieval Jewish societies that were socioeconomically the equivalent of your own. And this makes the world depicted in these works—that of Jewish life as depicted in art, as it has sometime been known—a world seen from a rather narrow and isolated perspective. The people who would have viewed the books we will encounter would have expected those volumes to be somewhat of a mirror of their own world, much like the mirrored faces in this page from a fourteenth-century Ashkenazic haggadah written and illuminated by Joel ben Simeon Feibush, which (in spite of accompanying the text describing maẓah as this bread of poverty) primarily reflect the countenances of members of the well-to-do sphere of the manuscript’s patrons and their dependents (figure 3). Consequently, the recovery, based on the manuscript evidence of Jewish life on the basis of Jewish illuminated books, is tendentious at best, rather as if one had attempted to reconstruct Jewish life in the twentieth century on the basis of an archeological survey, some 500 years hence, of the estate area in the Fieldston section of Riverdale, New York, or of Beverly Hills, California, or of the renewed Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. But still, we take what was left us, and if we are clever, we can mine what we have for secretly meaningful images, alternative histories, and all those fine and subversive elements historians garner from the documents of the elite when they lack material from the other societal strata with which to work.

A few words about words: this work is intended for nonspecialists, but it is necessary from time to time to make