Odd Couples: The Eagle and the Hare, the Lion and the Unicorn

Abstract

When a facsimile of medieval Hebrew manuscript known as Bird's Head Haggadah was published in 1960s, its appearance was applauded by American historian Meyer Schapiro for having united our interest in Jewish history and our of art.1 Schapiro, who was apparently speaking on behalf of his coreligionists, carefully referred to their love of art rather than to their oft-questioned talent for visual representation, a sensitive subject which had been raised by a number of seminal European authors. Richard Wagner in his Das Judentum in der Musik (first published anonymously in 1850) had argued that the sensory capacity for sight belonging to Jews was never such as to allow them to produce visual artists; their eyes are preoccupied with matters much more practical than beauty and spiritual content of things in phenomenal world.2 Wagner's argument, as late Jacob Katz noted, fell upon ready ears.3 It also proved highly influential. Early in twentieth century Werner Sombart commented, in his controversial study The Jews and Modern Capitalism, on the Jew's for inconcrete, his tendency away from sensuous, his constant abid-