The Image Of The Jew In Byzantine Art

The Image of the Jew in Byzantine Art is the first study of the relationship between the attitude to the Jews in contemporary texts and their corresponding representation in Eastern art. The analysis initially explores the documented antisemitic attitude of the Eastern Church and its pervasive influence on the role of the Byzantine Emperors. However, Dr Revel-Neher's discussion of the many illustrations of contemporary images (most seen in the West for the first time) shows that, unlike the Western art of the period, the Byzantine images aimed at an objective reflection of daily reality and were not subject to the antisemitic doctrines of the Church. The authenticity of the images is the hallmark of the Byzantine attitude to the Jews, in stark contrast to the grotesque and caricatural images in Western iconography.

These images, which reached a broad and socially varied audience across Western Europe, appeared in virtually all artistic media, including illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, sculpture, metalwork, and tapestry.".

The essays collected in this volume present a multi-faceted range of scholarship from late antique synagogues, Jewish funerary art, early Christian and Byzantine mosaics, to Byzantine and Jewish book art, and the representation of the Old Testament in Western manuscripts.

Does the design of the Tabernacle in the wilderness correspond to God’s blueprint of Creation? The Christian Topography, a sixth-century Byzantine Christian work, presents such a cosmology. Its theory is based on the “pattern” revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai when he was told to build the Tabernacle and its implements “after their pattern, which is being shown thee on the Mount.” (Exod. 25: 40). The book demonstrates, through texts and images, the motifs that link the Tabernacle and Creation. It traces the long chain of transmission that connects the Jewish and Christian traditions from Syria and ancient Israel to France and Spain from the first through the fourteenth century, revealing new models of interaction between Judaism and Christianity.

Byzantine Jews: Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures is the collective product of a three year research group convened under the auspices of Scholion: Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The volume provides both a survey and an analysis of the social and cultural history of Byzantine Jewry from its inception until the fifteenth century, within the wider context of the Byzantine world.

In Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators, historian Katherine Aron-Beller analyzes the common Christian charge that Jews habitually and compulsively violated Christian images, identifying this allegation as one that functioned alongside other anti-Jewish allegations such as ritual murder, blood libel, and host desecration to ultimately inform dangerous and long-lasting prejudices in medieval and early modern Europe. Through an analysis of folk tales, myths, legal proceedings, and religious art, Aron-Beller finds that narratives alleging that Jews committed violence against images of Christ, Mary, and the disciples flourished in Europe between the fifth and seventeenth centuries. She then explores how these narratives manifested differently across the continent and the centuries, finding that their potency reflected not Jewish actions per se, but Christians’ own concerns about slipping into idolatry when viewing depictions of religious figures. In addition, Aron-Beller considers Jews’ own attitudes toward Christian imagery and the ways in which they responded to and rejected—or embraced—such allegations. By examining how desecration allegations affected Jewish individuals and communities spanning Byzantium, medieval England, France, Germany, and early modern Spain and Italy, Aron-Beller demonstrates that this charge was a powerful expression of the Christian majority’s anxiety around committing idolatry and their eagerness to participate in practices of veneration that revolved around visual images—an anxiety that evolved through the centuries and persists to this day.

Although Christianity's precise influence on the Holocaust cannot be determined and the Christian churches did not themselves perpetrate the Final Solution, Michael argues that two millennia of Christian ideas and prejudices and their impact on Christians' behaviour appear to be the major basis of antisemitism and it's apex, the Holocaust.

This book examines the iconography of Judith, Esther, and the Shulamite in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth century in the works of the Polish-Jewish artists.