Skies Of Parchment Seas Of Ink

Introduction: for the love of books / Marc Michael Epstein -- The people of the book/books of the people: illuminating the canon / Hartley Lachter and Marc Michael Epstein -- Parchments and palimpsests: scribe, illuminator, patron, audience / Marc Michael Epstein -- The illuminated page: materials, methods, and techniques / Barbara Wolff -- Mapping the territory: ʼArbʻah kanfot maʼareẓ, 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 ʻArav: Spain and the Middle East / Raymond P. Scheindlin with Marc Michael Epstein ; The problem of national style / Eva Frojmovic with Marc Michael Epstein -- Iconography: telling the story / Marc Michael Epstein -- Dialogue and disputation: cultural negotiation / Marc Michael Epstein -- This world centered on the home: women, marriage, and the family / Shalom Sahar -- Glimpses of Jewish life: reality or illusion? / Marc Michael Epstein -- Incidental details: margins and meaning / Marc Michael Epstein -- Sacred and profane: naked ladies in the Haggadah? / Ágnes Vető -- Other worlds: fantastic horizons and unseen universes / Hartley Lachter wtih Marc Michael Epstein -- Zion and Jerusalem: the sum of all beauty, the joy of all the earth / Shalom Sahar -- In the royal court: Jewish illumination in an age of printing / Marc Michael Epstein -- A Yiddish Minhagim manuscript / Diane Wolfthal -- Illuminating the present: contemporary Jewish illumination / Susan Vick with Marc Michael Epstein -- Continuing the journey: annotated bibliography and manuscript descriptions / Jenna Siman Jacobs with Marc Michael Epstein.

Discusses four illuminated haggadot, manuscripts created for use at home services on Passover, all created in the early twelfth century.

The quotations contained in this monumental volume consist of aphorisms, maxims, proverbs, and comments of Jewish authorship or on Jewish themes. Here is a rich treasury compiled from over 2,500 years of Jewish writings–from the Talmud, the Mishnah, the Zohar, and the Bible, through excerpts from Rashi, Maimonides, the Baal Shem Tov, as well as Spinoza, Disraeli, Herzl, Freud, Einstein, and many others. For more than forty years Dr. Joseph L. Baron, the eminent Jewish scholar, gathered material for this work, mining all the great treasuries of classic Jewish literature. The result is this magnificent volume, a classic in its own time. Classified according to subject, the quotations are indexed by topic and author. Full source references are given as well as bibliographic data.

The Nuremberg Miscellany [Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, Bibliothek, 8° Hs. 7058 (Rl. 203)] is a unique work of scribal art and illumination. Its costly parchment leaves are richly adorned and illustrated with multicolour paint and powdered gold. It was penned and illustrated in southern Germany – probably Swabia – in 1589 and is signed by a certain Eliezer b. Mordechai the Martyr. The Miscellany is a relatively thin manuscript. In its present state, it holds a total of 46 folios, 44 of which are part of the original codex and an additional bifolio that was attached to it immediately or soon after its production. The book is a compilation of various Hebrew texts, most of which pertain to religious life. Others are home liturgies, Biblical exegeses, comments on rites and customs, moralistic texts, homiletic and ethical discourses, and an extensive collection of home liturgies, its major part being dedicated to the life cycle. The unparalleled text compilation of the Nuremberg Miscellany on the one hand, and the naïve, untrained illustrations on the other hand, are puzzling. Its illustrations are hardly mindful of volume, depth or perspective, and their folk-art nature suggests that an unprofessional artist, possibly even the scribe himself, may have executed them. Whoever the illustrator was, his vast knowledge of Jewish lore unfolds layer after layer in a most intricate way. His sharp eye for detail renders the images he executed a valid representation of contemporary visual culture. The iconography of the Nuremberg Miscellany, with its 55 decorated leaves, featuring 25 text illustrations, falls into two main categories: biblical themes, and depictions of daily life, both sacred and mundane. While the biblical illustrations rely largely on artistic rendering and interpretation of texts, the depictions of daily life are founded mainly on current furnishings and accoutrements in Jewish homes. The customs and rituals portrayed in the miscellany attest not only to the local Jewish Minhag, but also to the influence and adaptation of local Germanic or Christian rites. They thus offer first-hand insights to the interrelations between the Jews and their neighbors. Examined as historical documents, the images in the Nuremberg Miscellany are an invaluable resource for reconstructing Jewish daily life in Ashkenaz in the early modern period. In a period from which only scanty relics of Jewish material culture have survived, retrieving the pictorial data from images incorporated in literary sources is of vital importance in providing the missing link. Corroborated by similar objects from the host society and with descriptions in contemporary Jewish and Christian written sources, the household objects, as well as the ceremonial implements depicted in the manuscript can serve as effective mirrors for the material culture of an affluent German Jewish family in the Early Modern period. The complete Nuremberg Miscellany is reproduced in the appendix of this book.

Given the vast inventory of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals—pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes disseminated for millennia to debase, dehumanize, and justify the persecution of Jews, Bestiarium Judaicum asks: What is at play when Jewish-identified writers tell animal stories? Focusing on the nonhuman-animal constructions of primarily Germanophone authors, including Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, and Gertrud Kolmar, Jay Geller expands his earlier examinations (On Freud’s Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions and The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity) of how such writers drew upon representations of Jewish corporeality in order to work through their particular situations in Gentile modernity. From Heine’s ironic lizards to Kafka’s Red Peter and Siodmak’s Wolf Man, Bestiarium Judaicum brings together Jewish cultural studies and critical animal studies to ferret out these writers’ engagement with the bestial answers upon which the Jewish and animal questions converged and by which varieties of the species “Jew” were identified.

After the Bible, the Passover haggadah is the most widely read classic text in the Jewish tradition. More than four thousand editions have been published since the late fifteenth century, but few are as exquisite as the Washington Haggadah, which resides in the Library of Congress. Now, a stunning facsimile edition meticulously reproduced in full color brings this beautiful illuminated manuscript to a new generation. Joel ben Simeon, the creator of this unusually well-preserved codex, was among the most gifted and prolific scribe-artists in the history of the Jewish book. David Stern’s introduction reconstructs his professional biography and situates this masterwork within the historical development of the haggadah, tracing the different forms the text took in the Jewish centers of Europe at the dawn of modernity. Katrin Kogman-Appel shows how ben Simeon, more than just a copyist, was an active agent of cultural exchange. As he traveled between Jewish communities, he brought elements of Ashkenazi haggadah illustration to Italy and returned with stylistic devices acquired during his journeys. In addition to traditional Passover images, realistic illustrations of day-to-day life provide a rare window into the world of late fifteenth-century Europe. This edition faithfully preserves the original text, with the Hebrew facsimile appearing in the original right-to-left orientation. It will be read and treasured by anyone interested in Jewish history, medieval illuminated manuscripts, and the history of the haggadah.

Across the nine thematic chapters of Experiencing Medieval Art, renowned art historian Herbert L. Kessler considers functional objects as well as paintings and sculptures; the circumstances, processes, and materials of production; the conflictual relationship between art objects and notions of an ineffable deity; the context surrounding medieval art; and questions of apprehension, aesthetics, and modern presentation. He also introduces the exciting discoveries and revelations that have revolutionized contemporary understanding of medieval art and identifies the vexing challenges that still remain. With 16 color plates and 81 images in all—including the stained glass of Chartres Cathedral, the mosaics of San Marco, and the Utrecht Psalter, as well as newly discovered works such as the frescoes in Rome’s aula gotica and a twelfth-century aquamanile in Hildesheim—Experiencing Medieval Art makes the complex history of medieval art accessible for students of art history and scholars of medieval history, theology, and literature.

In the age of post-digital architecture and digital materiality, This Thing Called Theory explores current practices of architectural theory, their critical and productive role. The book is organized in sections which explore theory as an open issue in architecture, as it relates to and borrows from other disciplines, thus opening up architecture itself and showing how architecture is inextricably connected to other social and theoretical practices. The sections move gradually from the specifics of architectural thought – its history, theory, and criticism – and their ongoing relation with philosophy, to the critical positions formulated through architecture’s specific forms of expression, and onto more recent forms of architecture’s engagement and self-definition. The book’s thematic sessions are concluded by and interspersed with a series of shorter critical position texts, which, together, propose a new vision of the contemporary role of theory in architecture. What emerges, overall, is a critical and productive role for theory in architecture today: theory as a proposition, theory as task and as a ‘risk’ of architecture.