Aesthetics, Ethnicity, and the History of Art

Abstract

Part of a symposium providing a range of critical perspectives on aesthetics, ethnicity, and the history of art. The writer examines how two etchings of the Regensburg synagogue by Albrecht Altdorfer both encode a history of Christian-Jewish ethnic conflict and foreclose on it through the image of “disappearing” Jews. She contends that the etchings can be read as formative and constitutive of the new “science” in early modern European ethnography that grounded itself on the ontological absence of Jews. She concludes that a critique of this ethnography makes it possible to rethink Christian-Jewish ethnic conflict as a genealogy of the power of the “rational” and the “technical” rather than as something incomprehensible, instinctive, and ahistorical.