Epstein, Dreams of Subversion INTRO ... - Dickinson Blogs

XIV Preface
pied himself as a scholar. He replied that the task of a biblical exegete is similar
to that of a hunter who pass es silently through the forest until he perceives a
movement, and goes after its source. Origen's method, as he described it in his
Fragmenta in Evangelium on John 1 :25-30, was to scrutinize the text until he
saw something move, and then to pursue it with alacrity.
This book, which begins with a childhood memory of the Hunt of the Unicorn,
takes the hunt as its dominant metaphor, first and foremost, on the level of methodology.
Like Origen, I hope to penetrate the thicket of anonymity and genre by
examining specifically those elements in medieval Jewish art and literature that
attract attention by their odd movements in incongruous contexts in order to
track some of the more elusive elements in the cultural and intellectual history of
the Jewish people in the Middle Ages.
Beyond its importance as a methodological metaphor, hunting figures in the
subject matter of this book as well: each of the coming chapters actually discusses
hunting in some measure. This is deliberate; I demonstrate the ways in which
visual culture was adapted from the culture of the medieval Christian majority
into that of the medieval Jewish minority. I use hunting iconography as my test
case; although hunting would appear at first glance to be among the most characteristically
"uri-jewish" of activities, prohibited to Jews both by rabbinic culture
and often by medieval secular authorities, hunting scenes appear with
startling frequency in the illumination of medieval Hebrew manuscripts, where
the y are particularly susceptible to being labeled as merely decorative or as unconscious
borrowings. Such images stand out against their backdrop. The y attractour
attention. Their strangeness lures us; we impulsively join the chase, and we are led
into a grove of symbolism wherein both the topos of the hunt, and the various individual
manifestations of hunter and quarry we encounter along the way reveal
themselves to be fraught with profound and pervasive allegorical significance.
The hunt for the particular range of quarry that fills this volume began with
a survey of the corpus of surviving illuminated Hebrew manuscripts from the
twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, undertaken utilizing the resources of the
Center for Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts at the Jewish National and University
Library in Jerusalem and the microfilm collection of the Jewish Theological
Seminary in New York. This surve y generated a long list of animals whose presence
in medieval Hebrew manuscripts seemed somewhat unusual or unexpected.
First, I grouped together all occurrences of each particular animal image in the
medieval Hebrew illuminated manuscript corpus. I then examined the classic textualloci
for these animals, systematically following each one's progress through
biblical, rabbinic, and medieval sources, and in classical and Christian texts from
antiquity through the sixteenth century.
In the process of research, my list was narrowed to include only those beasts
concerning which it was possible to assemble a sufficient and sufficiently consis-
Preface xv
tent body of corroborative textual or iconographic evidence. A good many highly
interesting examples were eliminated from the list because the gaps in the corroborative
materials were too wide to bridge, even with well-grounded speculation.
Some of those cases are tr eated in the notes to this volume .
Ne xt, my focu s shifted to a survey of the iconographic representations of the
selected animals in ancient art an d in med ieval Christian art , with particular attention
to examples contemporary with or closely antecedent to the Jewish images.
Finally, I reexamined the examples of animal imagery I had culled from
medieval Hebrew illuminated manuscripts, applying the evidence gathered about
the place of each beast in medieval mentalites to the iconography that had previously
seemed strange or incongruous in Jewish art, in order to develop a reasonable
and textually grounded explanation for its inclu sion in Jewish iconography.
Chapters 2 through 5 pre sent the results of the se labors, describing the origins,
development, and contextual significance of four specific animal symbols,
each of which addresses a major are a of medieval Jewish rnentalites: national selfimage,
the image of the Torah, God and the problem of evil, and messiani sm and
eschatology.
In the process of working on these chapters, I found my thinking concerning
the ostensible consciousness or unconsciouness of this iconography evolving as I
developed, questioned, mulled over, and reworked my interpretations and was
questioned by others about them. The first and final chapters, the result of these
ruminations, discuss general problems of Jewish art and the place of animal iconography
in it. They argue that animal symbols, beyond their inherent fascination,
are of intrinsic value for the construction of medieval mentalites in general
and medieval Jewish rnentalites in particular. They challenge arguments that devalue
Jewish art by asserting that nothing about it is intrinsically Jewish, that it
means the same thing as Christian art because it is stylistically dependent upon it,
and that its very status as Jewish art is problematic because it might not have been
created by Jews. Finally, they dispute the widely held contention that animal elements
in Jewish art, particularly those that are marginally situated, are, at best,
mere borrowings from Christian iconography, and more likely, simply decorative.
My discussion cuts to the core of many of the established and tenacious assumptions
about the derivative nature of Jewish art. Accordingly, while there
may, I hope, be many who will view this work as intriguingly novel and historically
plausi ble, others will, no doubt, regard my conclusions as tendentious and
improbable overinterpretation. Since the consciousness of authorial intention can
never be determined with certainty, I have aspired, at least, to present my arguments
in an intellectually consistent (and coherent) manner.
This study took shape at Yale University, under the able guidance of David
Ruderman, at present Joseph P. Me yerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History
and director of the Center of Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. As