The Eye of the Beholder: Artistic Sense and Craftsmanship in Eighteenth-Century Jewish Books

Abstract

After the invention of printing in the fifteenth century, the Jewish world, in line with their surrounding non-Jewish worlds, quickly embraced the printed book as the most important medium for the transmission of knowledge. Nonetheless, even after the invention of printing, tens of thousands of Hebrew manuscripts were still being hand-copied, testifying to a lively, parallel writing culture. Many of these manuscripts were decorated or illustrated. One of the striking aspects of the decorated manuscripts of the eighteenth century is the enormous difference in quality of the works. Some are genuine masterpieces of scribal art in Hebrew or in Latin script, while others can be very naive and are clearly the work of amateurs. The central question in this essay, a reworked version of the author’s inaugural lecture at the University of Amsterdam, is why certain handwritten decorated Jewish books of the period look the way they look, and what this teaches us about both their makers and their patrons. It becomes clear, at least in its modern interpretation, that within the Jewish scribal tradition craftmanship was of greater importance than artistic sense. To what extent can only be understood in full when looking at larger developments within the eighteenth-century western European Jewish world.