Jewish art and non-Jewish culture: The dynamics of artistic borrowing in medieval Hebrew manuscript illumination

Abstract

Jewish manuscript painting of the Middle Ages documents various patterns of artistic borrowing. The present paper analyzes three test cases each of them offering a different angle for the observation of the dynamics of artistic borrowing: decorative design in Spanish Bibles; the style of figurative painting in Spain and Central Europe; the iconography of narrative cycles and their pictorial sources. The different political situations and cultural surroundings in which the medieval Jews lived shaped the art of manuscript painting in Iberia and Central Europe in versatile ways. In Spain the use of decoration patterns borrowed from Islamic architecture and painting should be understood as a cultural idiom with which Spanish Jewry had been familiar for centuries. Because of the circumstances of the Christian reconquest on one hand and the cultural struggle within Spanish Judaism on the other the use of this very cultural idiom had an even deeper meaning. Whereas in Spain the choice of styles reflected the Jews' reaction to political change, on one hand, and echoed cultural struggle on the other, in Central Europe it was due to social change. In terms of style, the patterns of artistic borrowing in Iberia and Central Europe are thus utterly different. In terms of iconography they are similar, but yet the results were very different.