:The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance.(Jewish Culture and Contexts.)

Abstract

Dana E. Katz analyzes a number of fifteenth and sixteenth-century paintings and inscriptions that commemorate religious crimes attributed to Jews and represent Judaism as a defeated religion, superseded by a triumphant Christian Church. Her chosen territory is central and northern Italy, where several governments practiced a form of tolerance that had nothing to do with religious pluralism. Rather, it rested on a conviction that Catholicism was wholly right and Judaism altogether wrong. Nevertheless, for reasons both pious and pragmatic, Jews could be permitted to live on the margins of Christian society, not as citizens but as resident “others,” outsiders who in hard times could well become selected targets for popular discontent. Katz shows how the violent or oppressive acts that sometimes attended the relationship between Christians and Jews were translated into the “quiet” or “representational” violence of paintings. In some ways these exorcized actual violence. They justified tolerance by demonstrating that Jews would be punished for transgressions but also stored up trouble by recording the atrocities of which Jews were supposedly capable. The author's choice of subjects is varied and imaginative. She pays close attention to the events that paintings reflect and the motives of the patrons who commissioned them. Well acquainted with a large literature, extending knowledge by archival research and skilful use of the camera, she employs her iconographic expertise to bring out the hidden meanings of the work. Some of the paintings refer unmistakably to members of the local Jewish community and to recent local happenings, others do not; some demonize and caricature Jews, others depict them without acrimony, but consign them symbolically to positions beneath the church and its saints.