Articles Jewish Art and Cultural Exchange:

Abstract

This chapter deals with cultural exchange, an issue crucial for the study of medieval Jewish art. It aims to propose a more precise definition of Jewish pictorial art than that of a minority operating within different majority cultures by discussing different theoretical concepts. The chapter presents, on the one hand, historical-anthropological models of interpretation, and theoretical formulations derived from literary studies on the other. These concepts are examined in several art-historical test cases from the field of Jewish art in which the issue of cultural exchange is particularly crucial. The chapter overviews of Jewish art offers abundant evidence that in developing their visual culture, the Jews were, as traditional surveys usually put it, heavily influenced by the art of non-Jewish environments. Keywords:Cultural Exchange; Jewish Art; non-Jewish environments; visual culture