Visual Environment of Jewish Learning in Twelfth-Century Rouen

Abstract

AbstractThe visual environment circumscribes the qualities of education both in the present day and in the Middle Ages and in both Jewish and secular education. This was true in the 1980s when Margaret Olin and I met teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was true in medieval Rouen.In 1976 excavations in the courtyard of the palais de justice in Rouen uncovered the lower story of a building with Jewish graffiti that has been associated with Jewish learning. In the late eleventh and twelfth centuries Rouen was an important Norman center with a substantial Jewish community. The structure, now called the Maison Sublime, was associated with Jewish learning. Norman Golb has posited that the building was a yeshiva. While other scholars such as Bernhard Blumenkrantz and Dominique Pitte, have posited that the building may have been a synagogue or house, most believe it had an association with education. The Maison Sublime was built by the same masons who built the nearby Christian Abbey of Saint-Georges-de-Boscherville. Boys would also have learned writing as part of their Hebrew education. Thus the medieval Jewish community was educating their students in what would have been recognized as an up to date environment in twelfth-century Rouen.